Efecto del oxígeno en el proceso de cianuración

Table 3. Typology of Political Participation

CATEGORY DEFINITION

Apathy

Rejection of all political parties and disinterest in the

political system and elections. Many people in this category believe that no matter who is in power, the political game will never benefit them personally. This group may have supported political groups they knew to be engaging in violence, but it would generally be described as something they were forced to do.

Ambivalence

Engagement with the political system and close following of elections and other political developments, but refusal to join a political party. Members of this category felt that politics were important and that they could have an effect on political systems; however, they exercised caution in choosing a political party or belonging to a group. This group may have supported political groups, but it would be described as something they did to manage relationships, or that they were forced to do.

Non-violence

Direct engagement with a political party or active political organization, but no participation in violence. This group may also have supported political groups they knew to be engaging in violence by providing food, resources, etc., but the emphasis is on their perceived level of choice in the matter.

Violence

This group actively participated in political violence. The testimony they gave evidences that they “fought” actively during the war as full members of a rebel group. There is some distinction here between those who were full-fledged combatants and those who were associated with the group, but did not engage in direct fighting. The definition here is based upon respondents’ own testimonies and their

descriptions of their experiences.

Military Service

Those who joined the military. This is a separate category from violence because they did not have the same

experiences in terms of demobilization and reintegration, and motivations for joining the military were often directly related to careers, since military service was treated as such.

Thus, one could not join the military in the same way a person could decide to fight.

The categories defined are fluid, and therefore bound to oversimplify any single individual’s experience. However, they offer the ability to directly compare those who participated in violence to those who did not. Beyond this, non-violence can also be analyzed for different typologies in relation to political activism. A person who rejects politics altogether and a person who engages in politics without violence have not made the same set of political choices and are likely influenced by key factors in drastically different ways. These typologies allow us to fully consider the wave of political activism and the political decision-making of those who did not engage in violence.

Individuals who participated in violence at any point in time were coded as such, given the extreme acts they were required to commit in order to be part of this group.

However, most who participated in violence, if not all, also fit into other categories at different points in time. While each respondent was marked as one of these categories, their interviews were also coded for other types of participation to permit fluidity between a variety of relationships to politics and violence.

Participation in Violence across Generational Locations

Those sampled ranged from 20 to 64 years old, and participants in violence ranged from 24 to 59 years of age. The sample was split into the three generational categories based on who would have fit these categories in 1993 and yielded the

following results: 39 were children, 43 were youth, and 10 were adults at this time. From this small sample, it is not possible to determine if one group was more likely than another to participate in violence, but we can infer if there are major differences in how

these groups experienced Ndadaye’s assassination and their choices for political action from the ways that people in the different sample groups spoke about politics and

violence and the ways they made choices during this time. One important detail to note is that while participation in violence was oversampled to ensure selection of both CNDD-FDD and FNL, youth had the highest levels of participation (20 joined and 23 did not), while children had the second highest levels (14 joined and 25 did not) and adults had the lowest levels (1 joined, 9 did not). This breakdown echoes some key patterns noted in other research on the Burundian civil war, namely the high rates of participation of youth with significant participation of children (though children did not comprise a majority of those involved as fighters).

Furthermore, the types of non-violent activism differed between generational groups. Children exhibited higher levels of ambivalence and non-violent participation than youth, and adults displayed the most apathy, with a much smaller group that identified as ambivalent. Of course, these trends are not perfectly representative overall, the ways that members of each generational location spoke about how they made choices mirrors these generational differences. In general, respondents who were children or adolescents at the time the war broke out spoke extensively about the influence of their friends. Children were also the group that spoke about class distinction the most, and the one for which political party was one of the most important identities. Young adults and adults emphasized poor governance, the influence of family members, and the

importance of their role within the family. Adults again referenced class issues and

emphasized an aspect that the other groups spoke about less: the moral significance of political participation.

Members of all three generational locations spoke about the influence of distinct identities and experiences, such as ethnicity, religion, or being an internally displaced person or refugee. These did not vary by generation, and while all of these elements factored into decision-making, none of them typically was the instigator for violence (non-violent respondents brought them up just as often as factors in their decision-making). In fact, religion and personal faith was almost exclusively associated with apathy and ambivalence when discussing how faith factored into decision-making.

Several members of FNL mentioned the group’s religious practices, but not as part of their own identities.

Education, on the other hand, differed between generations. Most respondents who were children during the war had only made it through primary school. However, there was a smaller group that made it through to a university. This split was likely a consequence of conflict. During the war, secondary schools in particular were dangerous for students, as the students themselves would engage in ethnic violence. However, many also lost access to primary schools during this time. As children, many of them would likely have had limited access to school during the war itself or difficulty proceeding through primary school into secondary school without delays. A smaller subset of this group may have prioritized and remained in school or accessed opportunities to study as they moved with their families. For children during the war, those who participated in violence all had less than a secondary school education, aside from one student who

eventually went on to study in a university. All other university students were actively engaged in politics in a non-violent manner (categorized as “non-violence”).

For youth (adolescents and young adults), however, 13 out of the 20 who participated in violence were in or had completed secondary school. A smaller group completed primary school (4) and never attended secondary school, and three had not completed primary school. Only two people in youth and adult samples went to a university, one who was ambivalent about politics (youth) and one who was apathetic (adult).

This cursory analysis reveals that, overall, older adults in 1993 were much less educated than young adults and adolescents, and much less likely to participate in violence. While Chapter Three established the importance of the role of the “caretaker”

as a deterrent to violence, the data here supports this again, even with men included. The older generation was much more likely overall to assume this role and to discuss it as a reason they could not join.

This cohort had already been targeted in 1988 in a massacre of approximately 20,000 Hutus under Buyoya’s rule. Although many were children at the time, they also clearly remembered the 1972 genocide, where higher estimates cite 210,000 Hutu deaths.

While that seemed to have discouraged the majority of this generation from participating in another uprising (given the swift and harsh reaction of the government), several scholars have noted that this cohort was also responsible for the PALIPEHUTU movement that eventually fed into CNDD-FDD and FNL rebel groups. Liisa Malkki (1995) has written about the specific experience of those who left as refugees during this

time. Tracing the trajectory of different refugee communities, she has explained that those living in the camp (compared to those who lived in a more urban area) chose to guard their Hutu identity and maintained strong attachments to the idea of one day returning to Burundi. Other refugees attempted to immerse themselves in new communities in Tanzania and leave behind their Hutu identity.

Malkkis’ work explains two key elements about the importance of generational location. First, refugee status alone is not a predictor of one’s interest in joining violence, because the way a refugee experience is structured has a profound impact on the

development of narratives about history and return to one’s former country. This supports Mannheim’s concept of generational units, whereby he acknowledges that, within a generation, common experiences may create separate groups with diverging ways of making sense of historical events, though they may not realize it. Second, this subset of the adult population influenced future generations by bringing this Hutu cosmology into the forefront for future generations.

Elyas, the only respondent who was an adult in 1993 and chose to fight, was immersed in these discussions before the war. He was not a main leader in the war, but did recruit young men to join, including his own son. The day Ndadaye was killed, he joined a group to revolt:

The first day, we took arrows. We left because nothing was going well in the country; by that time, even the whole army supported the former government.

They used our ethnic differences to divide the population – and we wanted to bring unity back to the country. That is what pushed us to fight. I hugged my wife, and she said, “Go, so that our country can have what it deserves.” We both wanted this to happen so no one would stop us to go because it was already in our minds. It was our will.

Elyas met with a group in the forest for years before he joined a group to fight in 1993. He donated food and other goods, and spoke about the situation. He knew this group was coming from outside of the community, but did not say where they came from.

These were also the people with whom he got in contact when he made the choice to join.

He highlighted an important element noted in earlier chapters about the social

organization of the war, which led to seemingly spontaneous yet planned massacres in response to Ndadaye’s death. Adults, and even young adults, were organized to believe in the possibility of democratic success and primed to react as a collective when Ndadadye was killed. The group who participated in this type of violence was much smaller than the rebel groups that eventually formed, but was highly motivated by principle.

Agathon and Simeon, two brothers in Cibitoke, recounted their experiences as refugees who fled after the 1972 massacre. Agathon, now 63 years old, was only 23 when he left with his family to the DRC: “We didn’t take anything in the house, we just ran to Congo and stayed there for four years. The conflict began years ago. The history between [Hutu and Tutsi] became bad after the country was created.” Agathon remained between the DRC and Burundi during these years. He returned again shortly after Ndadye was elected, only to leave again following his assassination. “Life in Congo was better,” he explained, “You could find a place to live. There was land. I knew people and UNHCR helped us. I helped my family by doing masonry.” Agathon focused on supporting his family and surviving, and although he remembered people in the camp teaching others about the importance of returning to fight, he was not drawn into it himself:

I was born in 1949. In 1972, my elder and younger brother were killed. All eight of my uncles were killed. Two of my cousins were murdered in their sleep. My house was burned down – many other people’s houses were burned down, too. It angered us, but it didn’t push us to join the uprising. All our land had been taken.

Then my father died and I had to take care of my brothers and my sister’s son. My sister also died. During war, no one gets to be with their families. I couldn’t join the war, though. It was just not my way of being. I saw enough from our fight for independence.

Agathon’s brother, Simeon, was 39 years old – not quite born in 1972. As a 20 year old who grew up in the DRC without the experiences of previous wars, he fully bought into the Hutu cosmology that Malkki wrote about. While he noted that he had opportunities in the DRC, he never intended to stay there:

What I missed in Congo was citizenship. We would never be protected, and people knew we were mostly against the [Burundi] government in Congo. Life was… you lived with fear in the refugee camp. Politics were always changing, but to me the politics was a bit separate. The problem was that Hutu could not trust Tutsi, and vice versa… My generation joined the fight, and now many of them are in the Burundian Army. Others I know went, but they died.

Going to the field, I saw two things. First, killing: there is no good in killing. I had the same beliefs as some of my friends, and we joined because there was no other place to flee. But many of them found themselves in the Rusizi [river].^xix Second, there is no future. It’s just the past repeating itself. Religions get along – if you aren’t in a political group, no one will bother you. There might be trust

eventually, but it will take a long time. Maybe our grandchildren will see it, but not us.

Agathon and Simeon directly mention the issue of generations and the ways in which Simeon’s lack of exposure to the violence of independence and the 1972 genocide shaped his relationship to the same messages and recruitment tactics differently from that of his brother. Adults and young adults who were not able to remember the violence of

1972 did not have these memories to influence their interpretations of the utility of the movement. While of course not everyone joined, a slightly younger generation was recruited on a much larger scale. In fact, men like Elyas (though a much smaller group) actually joined with their eldest sons and recruited other young men into armed groups.

Elyas was one of two respondents in my sample who joined the war with one of his sons, and one of four in the sample who recruited others into the war. Several others took on this role as they moved up in rank later on throughout the war.

Adolescents, many of whom were in secondary school during the war, were specifically recruited as young, able-bodied participants who would be highly dedicated to the causes of the group. In Rwanda, génocidaires were mostly adults and young adults who had been introduced to increasingly radical ideology for decades that eventually promoted genocide in order to protect Hutu people from a potential Tutsi overthrow. The state was the organizer, and heads of households were the main participants. The

narrative was vastly different, despite seemingly present similarities (given the ethnic divides between the two groups). In Burundi, adolescents who saw that they were consistently targeted as potential threats to the state found a sense of agency and opportunity in the idea of joining the war. Salvator, who joined the CNDD-FDD at the age of 18 years old, explained:

The idea [to join] came because of what was happening in the country; by that time no one was free because of differences in ethnicity. We were tortured often.

Then, we got angry and decided to fight. They first killed our president, Melchior Ndadaye. We elected him, and they assassinated him. War broke out, and we ran away, and that’s when I decided to join the rebellion.

Salvator fled to a rebel group with friends, who decided to join together. Olivier, who was 20 years old, had recently returned from being a refugee in the DRC with his family.

He similarly joined with a group of friends from school who were recruited early on during the war, and noted the odd relationship that developed between them as the expectation to join the movement intensified. Olivier in particular befriended the leader in Kamenge, who called himself Major Savimbi in reference to the famous Angolan rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi:

What made me join at first? It was not a hard life, it was just influence. My friend had a gun, and he told me to follow him he would teach me how to use it. Many of my friends were my schoolmates in the quartier – there were a few of them. I remember there was a Tutsi lady, and one of my classmates wanted to kill her. I tried to speak on her behalf, but he said he would kill me, too. He said he would blow me up with a grenade. He didn't even consider that we were classmates.

Some of them were crowded behind some stalls in the market talking, and I knew they were getting people for the war. A few of them had guns.

And the rebellion – I hadn't really been in the rebellion. I was just helping at first, but I was not officially a rebel. If my friend wanted me to bring him something I could get in their base and brought money for him. If my friend wanted to sleep I could watch over him with his gun and next morning gave back his gun. Savimbi was the chief, and they [CNDD-FDD fighters] knew I was his friend. I was with him all the time. I had no problems. Savimbi was a terror – you could not look him in the eyes.

I don't have parents, but I have a sister. She is 25 years old – she is married, now.

At the time, she was ten years old when my parents died. My mother died of an illness in February 1993. I am 34 now, and in 1993 I was fifteen. When I joined, my sister went to stay with our grandmother. I didn't choose the group to join, you know? I joined because of my friend. The Maquis^xx was the rebel movement at the

At the time, she was ten years old when my parents died. My mother died of an illness in February 1993. I am 34 now, and in 1993 I was fifteen. When I joined, my sister went to stay with our grandmother. I didn't choose the group to join, you know? I joined because of my friend. The Maquis^xx was the rebel movement at the